A/N: Okay so here is the deal. A small emergency has popped up and the time I thought I would have to proofread this quickly went from very little to nothing. Not that there aren't usually a bunch of typos in my other chapters (sorry!) but this will probably be worse than usual. I'll probably go back and edit it tomorrow on my break at work but I just wanted to get it posted tonight before I don't have time to do that either. Sorry again!

The Proper Way to Tell His Story

I did the best I could with it…

I barely felt the difference between the cold outside air and the much warmer inside air when we made it back inside Dalton's illusion of protection. I held Kurt's hand tightly and led him towards the dorms.

I needed to find Sebastian and I needed to do it fast.

"We need to call your dad," I explained to Kurt without him having to ask. I could feel his eyes on me and all the questions that he kept locked up behind his lips seemed to poke out and prod sharply at the back of my head, demanded answers. "But not with your phone or mine."

It took him a few seconds to ask the one question I knew that would inspire: "Why?"

Why? Because my family was insane. That was why.

I needed him to call Burt and make sure that everything was still okay in Lima. Then we needed to tell them to get the hell out of Lima.

"Let's just find Sebastian."

"Sebastian?"

"Yeah," I said distractedly. "For his phone."

"Blaine!" someone called and I groaned. Trent.

I didn't stop walking.

"Hey, wait up a sec!" he tried again, though I could tell by the way his voice trembled with movement that he was already making his way over. I didn't slow down until I came to Kurt and Sebastian's dorm. The door was open and Sebastian wasn't there.

Fuck.

Trent caught up to us sounding like he was out of breath. "Man, you guys can sure move fa—" he started, but I cut him off.

"Have you seen Sebastian anywhere?" I demanded.

Surprise showed on Trent's face before he could comment on it and he frowned in confusion before his mouth finally caught up with him. "Sebastian?"

Annoyance rippled through my stomach and I practically growled, "Yes. Where is he?"

Trent swallowed. "Oh—um, I don't know where he—" he swallowed again and held out a manila folder. "This is for you."

I huffed. "Put it in my room then," I said and turned, pulling Kurt as I went to continue looking for the weasel faced bastard. He was always around when I didn't want him to be, but the one time I needed him, he was nowhere to be found. It was fucking irritating is what it was.

"N-No, wait," Trent went on and ran to catch up. "I was told I had to give it to you directly."

That got me to stop, and when I did, Kurt almost ran into me.

I looked sharply at Trent. "Who told you?"

Trent bit his lip, looking guilty. "Actually, he didn't really say," he admitted. "He seemed trustworthy and kind of nice…I guess, so I didn't think to… to ask." He winced and then added in a rush, "But he said it was really important…"

"Of course he did," I growled, annoyed at being fucked with.

If you think Kurt is dramatic, Adam Anderson was twice as bad. Everything the man did had to be shocking and over the top in some way or he just wasn't satisfied.

I snatched the envelope out of Trent's hands and when he didn't leave right away, I asked, "Is there some reason why you're still here?"

"O-Oh!" Trent said, as if he only just realized that he had completed his task. "Sorry."

Kurt waited until Trent was gone before whispering, "Are you going to open it?" He barely moved his lips when he spoke and I only just realized how many people were walking around in the hall.

"Not here."

I turned back and pulled Kurt into his dorm for the first time in five days. I shut the door behind us.

I locked eyes with Kurt. He was standing in front of me taking deep, steadied breaths. He had his right hand resting against his pale neck and a strong sense of déjà vu hit me like a wall. Had it really only been a little over a month since that first night I saw him in the student lounge?

His lips turned up in a small smile he probably meant to look encouraging.

I dropped my eyes back down to the large envelope in my hands. I turned it over to the back. My name was written on it, but nothing else.

I turned it back over and unwound the string that was wrapped around that circular cardboard button thing. I never understood why people used the button when the metal clasp was so much easier to open and close, but then I thought that was probably why my grandfather chose it.

I pulled open the flap and reached inside.

There were two things inside. One was a large 9x11 picture of my mother and the other was a folded note, but I ignored the note in favor of reading the message that was written in elegant loops directly in the picture.

Perhaps you'll remember this woman.

I frowned at the words, not understanding what the hell he could possibly mean by that. Of course I fucking remembered her. She was my goddamn mother.

Then I heard Kurt gasp and the picture was suddenly ripped out of my hands.

I looked up to find Kurt with the picture held so tightly in his hands that he was crumpling the sides.

"Oh, god," he whispered.

I stared at him.

I didn't understand, but my body recognized the sense of foreboding well enough to respond with feelings of dread.

He looked back up at me with wide, wet, petrified eyes. "Do you know her?" he asked.

I felt my mouth open and close. The answer was yes (obviously) but that wasn't what tumbled past my lips when I finally found my voice. "Do you?"

I wasn't sure whether he even heard my question. There was something wild in his eyes.

"Who is she?" he demanded.

"My mother."

Those two words seemed to pull all the breath right out of him. "Mother," he repeated robotically.

I didn't know what to think.

Perhaps you'll remember this woman. The words ran through my mind again, at that point still just as strange as they had been when I read them. For a second I stupidly failed to make sense of anything, but then the reminder of his horrified stare was like a shot of clarity injected directly into my heart. There had been nothing even remotely close to confusion on his face when he had read the words.

It's for him, I suddenly realized.

The message was for Kurt.

I studied his face carefully. He looked like he was a million miles away, trapped in a dark place that he desperately needed to get away from but couldn't.

"How do you know her?" I tried to ask as gently as possible.

"I know her," he said in a tone that indicated he was still in the grip of whatever nightmare had gotten him. I don't know her. Not really.

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

He blinked and his eyes found mine. "Nothing." I don't know her name. No one ever told me who she was—I was only ever told what I was supposed to be doing. I saw her every single day, but I don't even know what her voice sounded like.

No, he wouldn't. I only ever heard her say two words: darling boy.

That wasn't the time to be thinking about that, though, so I pushed it to the back of my mind.

Kurt had said that he saw her every day. I was damn sure he didn't mean in passing on the street or sitting at a nearby table in his favorite coffee shop.

"When you say that you saw her every day," I started carefully, "do you mean when you were in the testing facility?"

"No," he said. Yes, his truth disputed, and he looked so ashamed of it that I could practically see his spirit shatter in his eyes.

It was the one subject we avoided and it was painfully obvious in that moment that avoiding it was no longer a possibility. I needed to know, and if the look on Kurt's face was anything to go by, he knew he would have to tell me.

It was a hard conversation to have, and not only because it had clearly been traumatic for Kurt, but because he was forced to choose his words painstakingly thanks to the constraints his condition placed on him. It was a hard thing to watch because it was obvious to me that he wanted to get the story over with as quickly as possible so he could go back to keeping it hidden in the dark pits of his mind where it belonged.

I'm actually going to do something I had thought of as a copout until now. I'm only going to include Kurt's truth. His lies don't belong here. It nearly destroyed me to have to listen to him verbally diminish his own suffering and glorify my bastard father just so the real truth could be heard. I'm not going to put myself through that again. Not for anyone or anything. I could barely handle it then and I sure as hell wouldn't be able to deal with it now.

This is what he told me:

Dad was working late that night so mom and I were eating dinner by ourselves when the doorbell rang.

I stayed at the table while she went to answer it—I was making a teepee out of my utensils or something childish and stupid like that. I just remember being really absorbed in what I was doing when heard a really loud thump. I thought it was weird so I called her name—just to make sure she was okay.

When she didn't answer I remember thinking that maybe I should go check on her but before I could even push my chair out there was a team of people dressed all in black in the house. Their faces were hidden and all of them had guns and I just remember the panic.

I didn't start screaming until one of them grabbed me and started pulling me towards the front door—that was when I saw my mother. She was lying on her back in front of the open door with blood seeping out of her head onto the floor.

They must have put me out after that because seeing her on the floor is the last thing I remember about that night.

I woke up on a cot in a small room. There was a woman sitting in a chair next to me and she had a hand wrapped around my wrist. I felt extremely calm and happy. She smiled and me, and I remembered smiling back at her despite feeling under all the happiness that everything was wrong.

That was when your father came in. He told me his name and he said that I was very important. He told me that I was going to help him change the world.

Nothing really made sense after that. For a while, every morning when I woke up the woman with the curly black hair and the smile would be there with her hand on my wrist. I would be forced to feel false happiness meant to keep me calm. For the rest of the day I would have to practice using my ability. It wasn't horrible at first—it was just monotonous and boring. After I ate in the morning they would move me to a smaller room with a table and then they would bring people in and sit them across from me. Then I would answer questions. Does this man have this or that ability or can this woman do this or can she do that?

Before I was taken, I never used my primary ability. Using it wasn't hard, though—just confusing. I didn't understand what the point of it was and no one would talk to me or answer my questions. For the most part I was happy, though, because of the woman with the smile. The happiness didn't feel right because I still knew that I missed my parents and that my mother was dead and I wanted to feel sad about those things, but the woman wouldn't let me. I tried my best to feel the way I wanted to feel, but I couldn't.

Empathy is a very broad term and therefore empaths themselves are part of a very broad classification. Some empaths like you, your father, and your grandfather, can merely sense the essence of another person. You can sense the truth when other people lie, but you can't force them to tell the truth. Other empaths, like me and the woman with the smile, can take everything about a person and change it until the only thing that's left of that person is what we want them to be. I learned to hate everything about that kind of empathy. It's one of the worst things one person can do to another and once I began to recognize that my own ability had the potential to be ten times more manipulative than the woman's, I became terrified that one day they would make me use it.

They did, of course, and I've never been able to figure out whether or not it was my fear that made trying to alter another person's ability feel so inherently wrong. Sometimes I wonder whether it would have felt just as wrong regardless of my own opinions on the matter. Either way, the process was emotionally damaging—both for me and the other person.

They started me off small—or at least that was how your father put it. I woke up one morning with him sitting in my room next to the woman with the smile. It was the first time I had seen him since that first morning and he told me that I had done a very good job with everything so far, but that now it was time to push.

He went with me to the room with the table when I was moved after the morning meal. There was a very large, very muscular man sitting in the chair across from mine. He had handcuffs on his wrists and a muzzle looking thing over his mouth. Your father asked whether I could sense his ability and I could. The man had the ability to manipulate water—nothing crazy; he couldn't make it move or anything like that, but he could alter the temperature and turn it to ice and back if he wanted.

Once your father knew that I could sense the man's ability, he told me that it was my job to take that man's ability away.

Once he heard that, the man started crying like a baby and I wanted to cry too. The woman with the smile was still making me feel happy, but I hated myself so much at that point that I could almost feel something that I thought was like sadness. It felt amazing and everything almost fell apart but then your father was there, threatening the woman and urging her to fix my emotions so that I would do what he wanted. Her hand was like a vice around my wrist, but her empathy didn't seem to be working like your father wanted it to, so eventually he took matters into his own hands and told me that I had two options. Either I took away the man's ability or he would find my father, bring him here, shoot him right in front of me, and then I would have to take the man's ability away anyway.

It took me hours to do it even though after your father's threat I was tried as hard as I could to give him what he wanted. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.

Your father was shouting with rage, the man in the muzzle was sobbing openly, the woman was still smiling, and I felt like two people had grabbed a fistful of hair at either side of my head and started pulling with all their might.

I did it, though. I took away a piece of someone, and he stared right into my eyes and cried the whole time but I did it anyway.

Your father checked the man to see if there was any trace of his ability left, but I already knew there was nothing. He smiled happily at me and ruffled my hair and called me a good sport.

I was seven years old and I hated myself.

The next couple months got worse. Once they had confirmation of what I could do, I was in a laboratory every single day with men in white coats draining my blood for testing and hooking me up to monitors while I took away ability after ability. Some people were happy to have me take their abilities away, but that didn't matter to me, I still hated doing it. Most of them, however, hated me just as much as I hated myself.

I lost interest in eating and feeling falsely happy all of the time started to make me even more depressed even though I was forced to feel happy about that too. Everything in my life contradicted itself.

I had four brain surgeries. After the second one I didn't care when they shaved half my head.

I fell into a routine. Wake up to the smile of the woman with the curly black hair, eat the morning meal, watch as someone came to take the woman away and wish that her damned happiness would leave with her—it never did—go to the lab, take away abilities, lie still while the scientists perform their tests and think about Dad, eat a midday meal, take away some more abilities, eat an evening meal, go to sleep, repeat. That was how it went until one day there was a small change in the routine. Instead of being asked to identify the ability of whatever person they put in front of me before I would take that ability away, the order was changed to, 'This is so and so, who is a D-whatever and has the ability to blank. Your job is to make so and so's ability stronger before you take it away.' It took me a long time to be able to do it, but I was eventually I mastered that too.

After almost five whole months of constant manipulation practice, I had been in the PC testing facility for nearly eight months and I could manipulate D5 abilities without having to initiate any sort of physical contact, but something was wrong. There didn't seem to be an end in sight. Everyone just wanted more more more and I wondered what would happen when my luck ran out and I wasn't able to give them any more. I worried over it every single day, wondering when it would happen and what they would do to Dad because of it. But again, despite all the worry, thanks to the woman with the smile, I was happy.

I woke up a third time to find your father in my room. He told me that now it was time for the final phase. He said if I succeeded that I would be allowed to go home and see my dad again. I was eight by that time but I wasn't stupid. I didn't believe him.

That day no one came to get the woman with the smile after morning meal and she followed me to the lab.

Your father sat her down across from me and told her, 'turn it off' and just like that, for the first time in seven months, the happiness was gone and everything was properly horrible and depressing and there was nothing to keep me from drowning in it. I blacked out.

I woke up crying three days later and your dad was furious. He dragged me to the lab and he sat me in front of the woman with the smile and he told me that he wanted me to give her a second ability. He said he didn't care what ability it was—weather control, teleportation, everlasting energy—it didn't matter as long as she was able to do something that she hadn't been able to do before and I needed to do it now or they would rip my dad to shreds and I would watch.

It wasn't normal manipulation. It felt wrong and unnatural and it hurt. After hours of nothing, my nose was gushing blood and I had popped a vessel in my eye, but the lab coats kept looking at their monitors and insisting that with just a bit more strain I could do it. Your father was completely out of control—screaming and throwing things. At one point I'm pretty sure the staff kept assuring him that I could pull it off just to calm him down, but he only got angrier the longer it took.

None of that was as bad as the woman with the smile because at that point she wasn't smiling. She was screaming and crying and gripping her head with both hands as if someone had crawled inside her skull and was trying to force his way back out.

I said before that I was doing something unnatural. It felt like I was doing something to force every single cell in her body to change into something they weren't supposed to be. It was agony, but it was possible—I could feel it. If I wanted it bad enough and if I pushed myself far enough I knew I would be able to do it.

But I was getting tired and it physically hurt to see her in so much pain. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel real anguish and it was unbearable. I didn't want my dad to die, though. I thought that they had already killed my mother and I screamed over and over again that I was sorry even though eventually she passed out and I was close to going over the edge too. It was like a black ink had started to fill my vision and I felt dizzy.

Then in an instant everything got really confusing. My mother showed up and the atmosphere turned cold. Mind control is a very dangerous, very powerful emotion and you can feel it right down to the center of your bones, but I was so lost. All I could think was that I had finally broken my mind completely and I was hallucinating. I was so tired that I was slumped in my chair at that point. The last thing I remember is how cold her voice sounded when she gave your father his first command: 'quiet.'

When I woke up the next day I was back home and my mom was dead. For good that time.

Kurt sat against the wall with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms looped around his legs. He looked off to the right somewhere, but it was clear that he was still just as lost in his memory as he had been when he started the story.

He looked just like a painting. A beautiful painting of the saddest boy in the world.

That had been my first thought when he finally finished.

I was sitting practically on the other side of the room and I was afraid to move any closer.

My second thought was that Kurt had seen the woman with the smile—my mother—more times in those eight months than I had seen her in my entire life. He knew more about her than I ever had. He knew she had an ability and he knew what that ability was. He had seen her when she was in pain. He had seen her happy. He had seen her cry. He got to see her every single day and I hadn't seen her in over two years. She was more his mother than she was mine.

I didn't know how I was supposed to deal with that.

Was I allowed to be upset about it? Was I allowed to care? Was it wrong that I was jealous of that fact that Kurt had parents who loved him? Was it wrong that I was jealous of the fact that my mother had shared a part of herself with him that she had never bothered to share with me?

And then there was my mother's point of view. Had she thought of me at all when she was with Kurt? Had she looked at his big blue eyes and thought of my hazel ones? Had she been lucid enough to know that she had an angry little boy back home who was dying a little bit each day that he didn't get to see the one person who had taken care of him when no one else gave a damn?

My mother's picture—the woman with the smile—was on the floor at the tip of Kurt's fingertips.

I had my grandfather's note in my hand.

I opened it and read it out loud.

Blaine,

I thought I would write you a letter for two reasons. The first reason is that letter writing is a dead form of communication and I think that's a shame. This is my own small way of rebelling against modern technology. The second reason is that your father is a very nosy man. He has the technological means to keep tabs on anyone he wishes, including his own father and son. I would be immensely surprised if he hasn't been monitoring our cellphone conversations for years—not that I condone such an egregious encroachment on our privacy, but as he is an adult, I no longer have the ability to dictate to him—not that I ever did.

I realize I'm getting ahead of myself. Old age, you know. I shall get back on topic.

I assume that by now you've seen the picture I included of your mother. I also assume that Kurt is with you and he has seen it too. If he hasn't, this will be very anticlimactic—even if I'm not there to witness it myself. If you please, indulge an old man; if Mr. Hummel hasn't seen the picture, please pause in reading this to show it to him before you go on.

Now that we are all on the same page, this will be much easier. Kurt's reaction to your mother's photograph must have been incredibly unpleasant and I do apologize for that. Unfortunately, the unpleasantness must continue. Running an organization as large and important as SIIPA is a sticky business. Occasionally, for the good of the organization, one must get his hands a bit dirty.

I'm rambling again. How the old mind wanders. Here is the black and white of it: I need use of your Mr. Hummel's extremely lucrative talent. I'll need it rather quickly—and by quickly I mean tomorrow, (the 14th). I realize that this is terribly short notice and I do apologize for the presumption that you will be free, but time is very much of the essence. If you are otherwise engaged, you may want to cancel whatever it is.

Now, I realize that you do not like me very much, Blaine, and that is a pity, but there is nothing I can do about it—you are almost an adult after all, and quite capable of making up your own mind about such things. The point is that I realize that you will be needing some incentive to come and meet me and here it is: it will be very much beneficial to the continued good health of Mr. Hummel's family members and current house guests (Burt Hummel, soon to be Carole Hummel-Hudson, Finn C. Hudson, Logan P. Hummel, SIIPA's very own Everly N. Sanford, Cooper M. Anderson, Santana J. Lopez, and Brittany S. Pierce ) for you both to come by to my home tomorrow at 3pm. There is something especially important that I would like to discuss with you both.

Hoping to see you both soon,

Adam Cassius Anderson

"What time do we leave?" was all Kurt had to say on the matter. He looked tired and broken down.

"Twelve," I told him.

There was nothing else to say.